


constant stars (i have seen them fall)

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 6x01 Tag, Angst, F/M, season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-02-29 20:46:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18785902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: Dust, marred by their handprints, written over alien technology. The mould of a body in the bed of the chamber. Streaks of rust red blood, dragging over the glass in finger-like talons, stretching away from safety. From where she could have found him.Simmons and the empty cryo chamber





	constant stars (i have seen them fall)

**Author's Note:**

> And we're back! I have so missed writing these guys, I'm super excited for the new season and immediately after watching this scene I was like 'gotta write that' so I wrote that! It's only a tiny little thing, but I love exploring those scenes, so I'll probably keep doing it lol 
> 
> WARNING: there is a brief mention of suicide, it's not involved but please steer clear if that's something you're sensitive to

Bloody finger prints. The heady scent of long undisturbed dust set free. A knot in her throat. 

The cryo chamber sits propped open in the cargo bay of the Zephyr, set up on crates and hauled in by her and Daisy. It was surprisingly light to carry so much grief. Startlingly empty, considering the weight. Simmons stares, watching, as if expecting a miracle, knowing one will never come. 

Dust, marred by their handprints, written over alien technology. The mould of a body in the bed of the chamber. Streaks of rust red blood, dragging over the glass – which isn’t glass, near as she can tell it’s a polymer blend – in finger-like talons, stretching away from safety. From where she could have found him. 

She should swab it. Run an analysis, check if it’s human, check the antigen type. He’s B positive. He pricked his finger for her their second year at the academy when she needed a comparative sample, even though he’s as squeamish about blood as he is with death. As tough as he’s gotten, all the times he’s sliced open his skin working with his hands, he’s still the sixteen-year-old who threw up into the trash outside the lab during their first dissection. 

But she doesn’t go to the lab. Not for gloves or cotton swabs. They’re well beyond science now. 

She touches the edge of the chamber, the casket, runs her index finger over the locking mechanism. There are a series of hooks webbed into the rubber seal, run by hydraulics no doubt, set into the base below the chamber. Fitz would pull it apart. Have it figured out in an hour and improved in three. 

She’d been prepared for a body. Contrary to what the others thought, she’s considered it. In the dark hours, when the Zephyr lights dimmed down to emergency only and the others fell asleep in rotating shifts, Simmons stared at the ceiling of her bunk thinking of exactly what it would be like to never find him. 

Not knowing, she’s decided, is both worse and better. To keep searching, to run dry their resources, their willpower, would kill her. Slowly, delicately almost, she wouldn’t even notice it until one day her breath would slip out of her chest and cease. 

Alternately, if they found his body, she’d already be dead. 

She’s cried over his corpse before. He isn’t dead, but there was still a body. Death has never scared her, not when her childhood cat killed a bird and left it on their front step, or at her Gran’s funeral, or when she wiped the plaster dust off his face, straightened out the shattered bones of his legs. 

It was the man she married, and she put a clean shirt on him, her fingers shaking as she worked each button through the hole, Mack hovering at the door, Daisy telling her she didn’t have to do it herself. But she did. She’s never been anything other than a perfectionist, and if it wasn’t done by her own hands, it wasn’t good enough. Not for Fitz. She would have dug the hole if they let her. 

So when the chamber opened, she was prepared for his body, ashen, frozen, unable to be revived. Or the stench of flesh that would make the others gag, the soft tissues caving in, bloated from decompression. She’d thought about what it would be like to find him outside the chamber, gun in hand, struck down by some unknown enemy and she’d thought about how far she would go to hunt that creature down. 

Everything but finding him, well and alive, ready to be awoken from his sleep seventy years early. Because if she didn’t think it, she wouldn’t jinx it. If she didn’t think it, it was still a possibility. But he’s still not here.

She climbs into the chamber, touching the metal where he must have. The shirts of his that she brought with her have long since lost his scent. She wears them anyway to sleep in and it aches. Out in space, even though she’s chasing after him, she’s somehow farther from him than she’s ever been. 

The lid seals above her, latches clicking, like a coffin, like the grave she woke up in in the framework. She won’t claw her way out of this one. Light filters in from the cargo bay, she closes her eyes against it and the hole in her chest. Without the cryo turned on, she’s got a limited amount of air. The seal will have her choking on her own lungs in an hours’ time. 

Part of her considers letting it happen. She could suffocate in the time it would take the others to come looking for her. An easy death, she knows, as deaths come in their line of work. There’d be no bleeding, no trembling fingers, no stuttered last words. She’d slip to sleep when the level carbon dioxide built too high, then once the oxygen was gone entirely she’d go too. Painless. 

She’s been near to it before, at the bottom of the ocean, in the med pod. He’d been there then, what feels like eons ago, young and weak and grasping her hand. She never thought they’d die apart. She’d been prepared to accept a hail of bullets, an explosion, or any means of violent death so long as she could hold his gaze and promise to meet him on the other side. 

Heaven has never been on her radar. She is a born and raised atheist, with scientists for parents and logic above all else in her blood, but she knows he has beliefs. Old ones, borne of Sunday mornings in the old stone church at the end of the road that smelled of dead flowers and old ladies, where his mother’s friends patted his back and fed him biscuits no matter what his grades came back as. He always dismisses it, as unscientific or illogical, but they’ve seen so many things with SHIELD that could claim to be magic, afterlife is not the most unlikely. 

But he’s still out there, somewhere, in this life. The chamber was empty. However improbable the odds, she can never give up on him. Not after everything they’ve been through, the odds they’ve already beaten. The bottom of the ocean, a portal to another planet, a computer simulation, time itself. Each time, he’s come for her and she’s fought for him. She could never be the one to break the pattern, to accept him as lost. He promised long ago to be her home, and to always come home to her. 

A tear slips down her cheek and she turns her face, reads the alien language – one of many she’s learned this past year – and resolves herself. She’ll find him. There isn’t another choice.


End file.
